[Aiwendil]

I have been hesitant to enter the discussion for fear of repeating all the arguments from the Canonicity thread (though I do eagerly await discussion of the chapters themselves). But I guess that some people will be reading this thread that have not put in the necessary hours of reading to keep up with the Canonicity thread, so I'll repeat, briefly, the gist of my argument against some of the views espoused by Davem.

Davem wrote:

That’s what I find odd - why put in all that work if the goal is merely to produce an entertaining story, why struggle so hard to get it published, as it was, even if possible with the Silmarillion, if he really believed it didn’t mean anything?

I don't see why we must qualify it as "merely" an entertaining story. To me that would seem to be exactly the point. Why is it not enough to "merely" create a good story? Is the creation of a thoroughly and profoundly enjoyable work of art not something worthwhile in itself?

I, for one, think it is. And to be quite honest, this view strikes me as the one requiring the least clarification and interpretation in order to make it fit with Tolkien's statements about allegory and applicability.

But this certainly does not mean that it is not to be taken seriously! On the contrary, I think that Davem is quite right when he says:

He seems to want us to take it all as seriously as he does, place the same value on it as he does - but I don’t think his motive is vanity.

But there is serious and then there is serious. The issue becomes confused because in the modern and post-modern mind set "serious" can refer only to the most pretentious sort of allegory. I think the critical point is that Tolkien wants us to take it seriously just as a story, because Tolkien thinks that stories are serious things in themselves - not because they have some hidden meaning, not because they change us or teach us how better to live our lives, but just because they are good stories.

As I said, I don't want to get carried away; so I'll end on a completely different point. Mr. Underhill wrote:

I've always meant to start a thread that focused on Tolkien's working methods, and any such thread would certainly have to start here with the second edition foreword. I think it's great that Tolkien wrote the book mostly on instinct and without a clear outline. It seems you can divide writers into two groups -- those who plan, outline, and structure aforehand, and those who dive right in and trust to gut instinct, inspiration, and blind luck to carry them through. The latter method seems to me to be the most romantic and pure sort of writing.

I once had the very same idea for a thread, but for some reason I never got around to it. One of us should start one some day. The insight it affords into Tolkien's writing habits is certainly one of the most interesting features of the foreword - though of course it cannot compete with the exceedingly (sometimes tediously) thorough work of Christopher Tolkien in HoMe VI, VII, VIII, and IX. Also, it must be noted that the foreword cannot be considered the final authority on matters of the dates at which various sections were written - for example, in the foreword Tolkien says that the whole was written between 1936 and 1949, but it seems completely clear from the extant manuscripts as well as from a letter to Stanley Unwin that it was in fact begun not in 1936 but late in 1937. For these matters, HoMe is the most accurate authority.